"From Kuroth’s Quill" is grodog's regular design column covering the elements of adventure design (and more-specifically dungeon design, given my interest in that topic). I will also wander through the design of spells and magic items; monsters, traps, tricks, and treasures; PC and NPC classes; planes and pantheons; and likely other topics as well. In the blog, I hope to provide practical examples that will be useful in campaign play, to show theory in action.

03 March 2018

New titles at Black Blade Publishing booth at GaryCon X

Black Blade Publishing will have a pile of new books and games available at our GaryCon X booth at this year, with new titles from Black Blade as well as from our many friends and fellow-publishers.

We will likely receive some other titles with uncertain arrival times that are being hand-delivered, so be sure to check back throughout the convention!

Goodman Games

Goodman Games, as usual, will have a pile of new Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures and supplements at the show, including Kickstarter-backer-only copies of the Mutant Crawl Classics rulebooks. Their Coming Soon page displays their newly-available books as well as those shipping soon.Of particular interest to old-school gamers will be the Into the Borderlands collection. It reprints two versions of each B1 In Search of the Unknown (by Mike Carr) and B2 Keep on the Borderlands (by Gary Gygax; B2 info at same link). This book also includes 5e conversions, essays about the history of the modules, new encounters, and more!

Other highlights include the new DCC fiction collection, Tales from the Magician's Skull, and, as an experiment for Black Blade, we'll carry the Goodman Games Fifth Edition Fantasy adventures for the first time at GaryCon this year. So, if you're playing 5e, drop by and check out the titles!

Stop By and Say Hello!

Jon Hershberger and I are always happy to catch up with old friends, chat with fans of the games we stock, and to put faces to names of folks we've only known online, so even if you're not interested in any of our books, do please drop by to say hello :DAllan.

10 comments:

Black Blade will also have a tips jar to collect support for Scot Hoover's GoFundMe campaign:

+B. Scot Hoover has a GoFundMe page up for helping to recover from a stroke he had last week. In old-school gaming circles, Scot goes by Kellri and has contributed substantially to the old-school gaming community through his writings and blog at http://kellri.blogspot.com/ His GoFundMe is @ https://www.gofundme.com/scot039s-stroke-xray-bill and could use whatever support you're willing to throw his way.

Indeed! And just in case you have no plans, I will be running a BX/Labyrinth Lord game at 6pm in Open Gaming (pre-gens). All are welcome, plenty of room and characters... sufficient treasure... and a surfeit of death!

Wish I could have made it out to GaryCon this year for the Big 10th. I was really trying & hoping to make it but real-life priorities got the better of me. AGAIN!

You're probably wondering, but I have been a long-time lurker and I've been a transient frequenter of many blogs and forums and everywhere I visit I see the name Grodog! Not just casual posts, but in profusion!! I'm awed and impressed at how you manage the time, so from the silent majority of Gygaxian Greyhawk fans I thank & salute you.

Now I will pull the stone sarcophagi lid closed and return to acolyte lurker status.

Actually, I'm seriously planning on making the trip to NTRPG Con! At the least my schedule may allow for a Thursday visit.

Thank you for the kinds words. I've actually been trying to trim back my online activities, to focus more on writing and design work, but Greyhawk keep pulling me back in ;)

Black Blade will definitely be attending NTX for the entire show, so do please drop by the booth to say hello! Games registration began Friday night/Saturday morning, in case you're interested in registering for something.

I had a thought experiment you might enjoy. I was comparing the tournament versions of Tomb of Horrors, Tsojconth, and Barrier Peaks, comparing all the named locales. Most of them share at least two locales between each -- Duchy of Geoff named in all three, which must have significance. Anyway, in comparing the possible locations of the Tomb of Horrors to the recent Dave Megarry Great Kingdom map I noted how "remote" each was. So I got out a drafting compass and put the point in the middle of Wallworth and extended the pencil to the Duchy of Geoff (eastern end of the duchy being one of the locations) and started drawing an arc. And wouldn't you know it, this arc intersected many of the stated locations. In fact it almost perfectly crossed the "blue "blobby" mark northwest of the "of" of the Egg of Coot. Could this be the, "highest hill in the Egg of Coot"?? In taking this logic further, the mysteriously vague placement of the Wild Coast would be off-map below Keoland. I'm more inclined to think that the wild coast is that southern coastline south of the "Contested Area" text, and that desert west of it falls east of Keoland. If we compare this to the yellow "outdoor" map in Rob's ERK DVD then the area crystallizes a bit -- the same bend in the coastline in each map.

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About grodog

Allan T. Grohe Jr. has been playing D&D and other rpgs since 1977. Allan’s first professional gaming publication (“More for the Shadow Master”) appeared in White Wolf Magazine #11 in 1987; he has also contributed to The Unspeakable Oath, Pyramid, Polyhedron, and Dragon Magazine, among others. Allan co-founded Event Horizon Productions, and has worked extensively with Biohazard Games (Blue Planet, Upwind), Pagan Publishing (Call of Cthulhu publisher of Delta Green), Different Worlds Publications (Tadashi Ehara), and Pied Piper Publishing (Robert J. Kuntz). Allan co-founded Black Blade Publishing with Jon Hershberger in 2009.
Allan’s editorial, design, and development work has contributed to winning one Origins Award and securing four Origins Award nominations, winning one ENnie Award and two ENnie Award nominations.
Allan is known online as grodog, where he publishes a website featuring Greyhawk D&D content, as well as his non-gaming writing (poetry, personal essays, and literary scholarship), and the usual fan ephemera. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, with his lovely wife Heather, their two boys Ethan and Henry, and their two pugs Tara and Gypsy.